Contending for the Gospel

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Christ glory, peoples soul, and the church are at stake when we move from the gospel.

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Introduction

Have you ever gotten news that made your mouth just drop?

No Other Gospel

6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

10 For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

A question to remember as we walk through this passage: If you had been in the Galatian church, would you have been able to tell what is the true gospel?
This is what we need to remember: The people who were coming to the church here were baptized members of the Christian church. They had come saying, “ We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savour

The Departure (6-7a)

6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— 7 not that there is another one,

Normally, Paul takes time to give a reason why he is thankful. But not here. He gets right into rebuke. even to the Corinthians, for all their immortality, recieves a praise from Paul.
The Upside-Down Gospel
British term: “Gob-smacked.” Opens his mouth, claps his hand over it, and lifts his eyebrows in amazement. He is amazed and astonished. He’s shocked and outraged.
Parents, or even anyone. If you see a kid running into the road, wouldn’t you yell, “Hey, there’s a car coming! Watch out!” He offers no pious platitudes, only passionate warning. Wouldn’t you do anything you can do to stop that kid from running across the street.
You can imagine what Paul is doing here. He reads the report. Grabs a parchment, slamming an inkwell on the desk, calls in the secretary As he paces back and forth in his room, he dictates his letter in short, angry outburst: “paul…apostle…I’m surprised at you!”

Two reasons for his astonishment of their departure:

Their turning away form the gospel was serious. Deserting = changing allegiances.

Redskins fan turning sides to a Cowboys fan. Putting on a different jersey. That Galatians had come to Christ and put on the robes of righteousness and were now trying to turn back to the trash can to retrieve their old cloths of works-based religion.
An anquantence: No difference between mormon and Christianity. I was grieved, because that person couldn’t distinguish the difference between the two gospels.
The Turning away from the gospel happened so soon!
How quickly they were running away.
Deserting him who called you the one who called you.
They’ve lost the fact that God is the one who called htem, but grace, not by their works.
The word deserting is good. Military context for traitors/turncoats. Paul is calling the Galatians spiritual turncoats.
Galatians Another Gospel?

They were turning away. “Deserting” is a good translation because the word was first used in a military context for traitors and turncoats. Later it was used to describe anyone who converted from one religion or philosophy to another. The Galatians were betraying their allegiance to Jesus Christ and going over to the other side. The fact that the verb occurs here in the present tense is significant. It describes something the Galatians were in the process of doing at that very moment. But they had not done it yet, so there was still a chance to stop them.

It’s a amazing for Paul. His missions trip to them was a time where God was at work. Sinners were saved. Miracles were performed. Churches were planted. IT was one of the most success missionary journeys in the history of Christianity, which is why Paul could hardly believe that the Galatians were falling away already. As soon as he left, the Judiasers came. In no time at all, the church was giving up the gospel. Yet, this is a reminder how easy it is to fall unless we are kept safe by God’s grace.
The Gospel, that’s what the Galatians were giving up. They were abandoning the good news about he cross and the empty tomb. The good news of God’s grace is his unmerited favour for undeserving sinners. The gospel proclaims that Jesus died and rose again to save us from sin. When the Galatians turned away from the gracious gospel, they were not just adopting a new philosophical position. THey were not simply trading on set of ideas for another. No, Paul said to them, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel - not that there is another one...” They were deserting God himself. This put thier betrayal in personal terms. They could not give up the gospel without giving up God himself.
The New American Commentary: Galatians (1) The Crisis in Galatia (1:6–7)

We do poor service to Christ and his church when we indiscriminately lead men and women to profess faith in Christ but then leave them vulnerable, like the exposed infants of ancient Rome, to the ravenous wolves that seek their destruction

The Turning away from the gospel happened so soon!

It’s a amazing for Paul. Imagine. You spent three years reaching out with the gospel to these cities. Great tribulations. Traveled over mountains, faced danger, and are left for dead before you see some people coming to Christ and churches forming as a result. His missions trip to them was a time where God was at work. Sinners were saved. Miracles were performed. Churches were planted. It was one of the most success missionary journeys in the history of Christianity, which is why Paul could hardly believe that the Galatians were falling away already. As soon as he left, the Judiasers came. In no time at all, the church was giving up the gospel. Yet, this is a reminder how easy it is to fall unless we are kept safe by God’s grace. In this letter you can hear Paul’s anguish,
Galatians 5:1 ESV
For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
The Gospel, that’s what the Galatians were giving up. They were abandoning the good news about he cross and the empty tomb. The good news of God’s grace is his unmerited favour for undeserving sinners. The gospel proclaims that Jesus died and rose again to save us from sin. When the Galatians turned away from the gracious gospel, they were not just adopting a new philosophical position. THey were not simply trading on set of ideas for another. No, Paul said to them, “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and turning to a different gospel - not that there is another one...” They were deserting God himself. This put thier betrayal in personal terms. They could not give up the gospel without giving up God himself.

BUT Their turning away was not hopeless

As desperate as this sounds, there is still hope. The word “deserting” here is continuous present tense verb, which means that they were in the process. Paul is contending for the gospel, he wants to correct them. Paul encourages them and challenges them to consider where they went wrong. As long as our drifting friends and family are still breathing, let us not stop contending for the faith.
Transition: Paul was astonished at the desertion, but he was still hopefully they would turn back. Their desertion was happening because of a distortion of the gospel.
What do we learn about the gospel? When you turn from the gospel, you turn from God himself (vs 6) When you turn from the gospel you turn from the grace of Christ. When you turn from the gospel, you have nowhere else to god (6-7).
So let me as you again: If you had been in the Galatian church, would you have been able to tell what is the true gospel?

Their turning away form the gospel was serious. Deserting = changing allegiances.

Redskins fan turning sides to a Cowboys fan. Putting on a different jersey. That Galatians had come to Christ and put on the robes of righteousness and were now trying to turn back to the trash can to retrieve their old cloths of works-based religion.
An anquantence: No difference between mormon and Christianity. I was grieved, because that person couldn’t distinguish the difference between the two gospels.
The Turning away from the gospel happened so soon!
So let me as you again: If you had been in the Galatian church, would you have been able to tell what is the true gospel?
BI: Christ glory, peoples soul, and the church are at stake when we move from the gospel.

The Distortion (7b)

but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

To distort is to pervert. Many things can distrub the peace of the church, but these troublemakers were doing the most distrubing thing of all. John Stott said it this way, “The church’s greatest troublemakers (now and hten) are not those outside who oppose, ridcule, and persecute it, but those inside who try to change the gospel.” This is what the Judiazers were doing. They wanted to “distort the gospel of Christ.”
When the good news of Jesus is right side up, we have the gospel. If we take it and stand it on its head, we end up withthe law. But it is not always easy to tell the difference. Realize how plausible this other gospel sounded. You can here what they were saying: “We believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savour of the World. He is the Miessiah, the chosen one of Israel, who died on the cross for our sins and rose again from the dead. You must repent of your sins and trust in Jesus Christ to be saved.” But then they would add to it. They would say, “Hey, come on, we’ve been worshiping God for a long time now. Jesus said that he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. If you want to the full gospel, you need to be circumcised in order to get it.” What could be more responsible? They were spreading a false gospel that was turning people way from the gospel of free grace.
Who were these people? They were spreading a false gospel that was turning people way from the gospel of free grace.
Again, let me ask you this questions: If you were in the Galatian church, could you tell the difference between the false gospel and the true gospel?
What do we learn about the gospel? When you turn from the gospel, you turn from God himself (vs 6) When you turn from the gospel you turn from the grace of Christ. When you turn from the gospel, you have nowhere else to God (6-7).
Modern Gospels
Turning from the gospel is like stepping onto a performance-religion treadmill. Do you like treadmills? I don’t really understand them. People like them, gyms are full of them. But think about you. You run for 5 km only to end up exhausted and in the same place 30 minutes later. Works-based religions is a system that gets you nowhere and only leaves you worn out. While works certainly matter, we should note they are the result of true faith, not the basis for it.
More importantly, could you distinguish between the true gospel and all the false gospel in the church today? There’s a lot at stake here.
We worship in a church of many gospels. There is the gospel of material prosperity, which teaches that Jesus is the way to financial gain. There is the gospel of family values, which teaches that Jesus is the way to a happy home. There is the gospel of the self, which teaches that Jesus is the way to personal fulfillment. There is the gospel of religious tradition, which teaches that Jesus is the way to respectability. There is the gospel of morality, which teaches that Jesus is the way to be a good person.
What makes these other gospels so dangerous is that the things they offer are all beneficial. It is good to be prosperous, to have a happy home, and to be well behaved. Yet as good as all these things are, they are not the good news. When they become for us a sort of gospel, then we are in danger of turning away from the only gospel there is.
Raymond Ortlund Jr. has tried to imagine the church without the gospel. “What might our evangelicalism, without the evangel, look like?” he asks. “We would have to replace the centrality of the gospel with something else, naturally. So what might take the place of the gospel in our sermons and books and cassette tapes and Sunday school classes and home Bible studies and, above all, in our hearts?” Ortlund lists a number of possibilities:
• “a passionate devotion to the pro-life cause”
• “a confident manipulation of modern managerial techniques”
• “a drive toward church growth”
• “a deep concern for the institution of the family”
• “a clever appeal to consumerism by offering a sort of cost-free Christianity Lite”
• “a sympathetic, empathetic, thickly-honeyed cultivation of interpersonal relationships”
• “a determination to take Canada back to its Christian roots through political power”
• “a warm affirmation of self-esteem”
In other words, the church without the gospel would look very much the way the evangelical church looks at this very moment. We cannot simply assume that we have the gospel. Unless we keep the gospel at the center of the church, we are always in danger of shoving it off to one side and letting something else take its place.
We are living in a day, and this is our moment, when we need to live like Christ, as gospel Christians in the midst of shouting, anger, and hatred. Grace doesn’t destroy our nature. it liberates our nature to be what God created it for. And we are called to reflect Christ to a broken world.
The good news of the cross and the resurrection must be preached, believed, and lived. Otherwise, it will be lost.
The church’s greatest danger is not the anti-gospel outside the church; it is the counterfeit gospel inside the church. The Judaizers did not walk around wearing T-shirts that said, “Hug me, I’m a false apostle.” What made them so dangerous was that they knew how to talk the way Christians talk. They used all the right terminology. They talked about how they “got saved.” They told people to “trust in Christ.” They “presented the gospel.”
Only they did not have the gospel after all. We should expect, therefore, that the most serious threat to the one true gospel is something that is also called the gospel. The most dangerous teachers are the ones who preach a different Christ but still call him “Jesus.”
So, for example, a preacher in a well-established church always talks about the gospel, but never gets around to confronting sin. Or a Mormon invites people to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ (of Latter-day Saints). Or a Roman Catholic signs a statement that says, “We are justified by faith in Christ,” but without ever specifying that justification comes by faith in Christ alone. Or a theologian who calls himself an evangelical teaches that there are many ways to God, and that Jesus will save people through other religions. They all seem like such nice people. They all say that they believe in Jesus. But who is the Jesus they believe in? Is he the Christ who is God as well as man? Is he the Christ whose cross is the only atonement for sin? Is he the Christ who is the Judge as well as the Savior? Is he the Christ whose righteousness alone can make us right with God?
Not everyone who calls himself a Christian serves Christ, and not everything called the gospel is the gospel. It is not mere words that save; it is the realities of the one true gospel that save—Jesus Christ in his death and resurrection for sinners.
False teachers create confusion and division, reverse the gospel. What is the alternative to works-based systems? Christ’s righteousness given to us by grace alone through faith.
What is the Gospel? The Bible defines it already for us in short statements like in in .
1 Corinthians 15:3–4 ESV
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,
1 Corinthians 15
Romans 1:1–4 ESV
Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
Could you distinguish between the true gospel and all the false gospel in the church today?
Ryken, P. G. (2005). Galatians. (R. D. Phillips, P. G. Ryken, & D. M. Doriani, Eds.) (pp. 20–22). Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing.
BI: Knowing the gospel is important because Christ glory, peoples soul, and the church are at stake when we move from the gospel.

The Warning (8-9)

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. 9 As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.

The only Gospel there is
For me, this is a sobering reminder of the responsibility i have as a teacher. Look at what Paul says, “But if we or an angel...” If anyone preaches a false gospel, a curse should be on the person.
The seriousness of the deserting is really shown in the warning. Paul issues a condemnation in the strongest words possible and then repeats it for emphasis. One of the harshest statements in the entire New testament. I don’t think this really sets will with some of us, in a world that is accustomed to hearing of tolerance at any price and a doctrine of God devoid of judgement and wrath, yet here it is. If anyone teaches anything other than the gospel that God has given us, let him be accursed.
For me, this is a sobering reminder of the responsibility i have as a teacher. Look at what Paul says, “But if we or an angel...” If anyone preaches a false gospel, a curse should be on the person. Notice here, Paul brings himself under this very curse.
Notice here, Paul brings himself under this very curse.
The Gospel is essential because Christ’s glory is at stake. False gospel always glorify man because they boast in human achievements. The real gospel boasts only in the Lord (). A pastor named Spurgeon put it his way, “if you meet with a system of theology which magnifies man, flee from it as fas as you can.” If we could be good enough and keep enough rules to merit eternal life, then we could sin about ourselves instead of Jesus. But that is not the case.
The Gospel is also essential because people’s souls are at stake. It is the gospel alone that saves.
The Gospel is essential because the health of the church is at stake. Paul knew that if the Galatians miss the gospel, they miss everything. Here is what this means for us as a church: we can have disagreements over some things, but we must unite on the essentials of the gospel. There are open-handed issues. I will die for the gospel, but not for a style of music, or the look of a room, nor over details about the end times, not because I do not like tambourines in the worship serves, but because they aren’t worth it. Yet sadly, more people divide over issues nothing to do with the gospel than over this matter of first importance. In fact, to divide on anything else but the issue of the gospel, is actually an anti-gospel.
Galatians The Only Gospel There Is

Because the gospel is God’s gospel, there will never be another. To be sure, the gospel has its rivals. There are religions such as Islam that claim to be based on the revelation of angels. There are cults that claim to have a special message about how to be saved from the coming judgment. There are even Bible scholars who take Galatians and say that the Protestant Reformers were wrong: it is not really about justification by faith alone after all. This is the approach taken by advocates of the New Perspective on Paul and the law, in which Galatians is reinterpreted as focusing on Jewish-Gentile relations and not on the more ultimate question as to how sinners can be righteous before God.

To any and all challengers we give the same answer that Paul gave to the Galatians: “But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:8). To show that this was not a rash exaggeration, fueled by excessive passion, but his mature and settled judgment, Paul virtually repeated himself: “As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed” (Gal. 1:9). In this verse the apostle speaks in the indicative rather than in the subjunctive. Verse 8 was hypothetical (“if anyone should preach”). Verse 9 is actual (“if anyone does preach”). Paul is addressing the real situation in Galatia, where false teachers were preaching a false gospel.

The true gospel is not only the one that Paul preached, but also the one that the Galatians accepted. Anyone who preaches any other gospel is, to put it literally, “anathema.” This is the Old Testament idea of “a person or thing set apart and devoted to destruction, because hateful to God.” To be anathema is to be under the divine curse, like the Canaanite cities that God utterly destroyed. Paul is saying that he would be damned if he ever preached another gospel. Anyone who teaches another gospel is subject to the wrath and curse of God.

There is no other gospel. Sinners must either receive this one true gospel or be eternally condemned. God offers the free gift of eternal life, through faith in his Son Jesus Christ, who died for our sins and rose again. If we reject this gift, what else can God possibly do to save us?

Our aim is to be a gospel centred community. We want to a family that is so in love by the gospel that this is what is an identifying mark for us. That we have been saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. That if we are to fight about anything, that it would be this and this alone. Doctrine matters, theology matters, the true gospel matters.
Paul’s warning to us is important, because:
BI: Christ glory, peoples soul, and the church are at stake when we move from the gospel.

The Ambition (10)

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

Transitional verse that ties what has been said with what will be said.
In other words, if Paul desired to be a people-pleaser, then he would never have turned his life over to Christ. He was formerly admired for his zeal for another religion. If he’s goal were admiration, then he would have remained there. Paul’s
Let me ask you one more question: Whom do you long to please? Whose approval matters most?

Conclusion

Are you a servant of Christ? Adore Him in your heart. Recognize the grace that He has given you and the death he endured for you. Contend for this message with courage and with power of the Spirit that is yours in Christ.

Response and Reflection

If you had been in the Galatian church, would you have been able to tell what is the true gospel?
How should you pray for those who are preaching the gospel in London today?
Why must we contend fo the gospel? What hinders people from contending?
How would you describe Paul’s ambition? How is his ambition different from the ambition of the world?
How should you pray for those who are preaching the gospel in London today?
How did Paul’s identity affect his ambition?
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